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You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast.
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Straightforward, no nonsense business advice, completely on unfiltered. Grow your business, grow your life.
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Now here's your host, Brian Fullerton.
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Hey, what's going on, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. It is your host, Brian Fullerton here hanging with you guys and good morning. Hanging with you. Here we go. I'm actually sitting right now. Mostly likely you guys are too, either sitting on a lawnmower or maybe you guys are doing some hardscaping, design, build, install work, you know, maybe cutting some bricks, hopefully paying attention and doing a good job with all that. But what I wanted to talk to you guys about here today, first off, we will not have a Monday show. We're gonna take Memorial Day off. You know what, we're gonna just take it a little bit more corporate, you know what I mean, and give a little rest to the voice into the, the podcast show. It's been a busy, gosh, you know, three or four months going from January through today. No real breaks, no real days off, and that's okay, you know, but at the end of the day, most folks are going to take a take off or honor or observe Memorial Day. We are for sure. So I'm gonna just kind of pull the plug for Monday, relax a little bit. We're having a four day weekend here at Brian's Law Maintenance, which is just an awesome privilege to be able to do that and to provide that for the team. And that means that I get to at least turn it off for one day, right? Maybe mentally out of the three or four days, if, you know, you know, but it feels good to be able to offer that to the guys. And all of our work got done on schedule despite some pretty, you know, challenging first couple of days of the week we had. One of the guys had to call off, unfortunately, he was not feeling good. Another gentleman slept in, slipped over his alarm by about two hours. And then one of my, uh, crew members, crew leads, I should say, threw his back out and was out for a day or two and had to just create a quick incident report. Was going to go to urgent care. I decided against it, actually. We documented that he declined. Then he just wanted to take a day off, so he took a PTO day. So it was like a weird, like, you know, amalgam ish of the start of the week for us. I mean, it was a, you know, real life stories over here. No different than probably some of the same, you know, real Life, nonsense, drama, reality, whatever you want to call it, it is what it is kind of stuff this week as well that, that you guys probably deal with. But that being said, we finished on time. Everybody did a great job, great attitudes. By the, by the end of the week, everything went well. And we actually scooped up one new commercial site this week, and I'm hoping to actually land the plane and close another one this next week, which would be awesome. And I need about 12 or 15 more of these bad boys to finish out, maximizing out for the most part. Right. Three crews with four days worth of work. So as you can imagine, I'm definitely interested in closing and getting the right price, the right number, of course, but another dozen sites would really round out our portfolio for what we're looking for to keep everybody moving and grooving for the hours that I'm allotting. What I wanted to talk about here today for just a couple of minutes is I think, a topic that I believe a lot of us could improve upon, actually document or if we have a pseudo system right in our brain or what we kind of do out of habit, maybe start documenting some of this process for our team. And this actually stems from a conversation that we had yesterday with Tommy Cole, who is. Works at leanscaper. He's a fantastic gentleman there. Does a lot behind the scenes. Sometimes he's speaking on stage. Fantastic individual, if you happen to know Tommy. Just a great gentleman all around. He's a really, really good dude. Family man, great guy. He had worked at McFarland Stanford for seven or eight years. Before that, he worked in contracting for about 20, 25 years doing dirt work, civil engineering work, and hardscape design work. Working with an architect. Might have even been an architect, to be honest with you, for a giant firm down in Texas. Helped take a company from 4 million to 30 million with their design build side of the business. Just a really, really good dude. And there's these. There's these great folks and talent in the, in the industry that you definitely like, should get to know and get to network with, and they're great people. Well, he was on Link Live last week, Wednesday. Once a month we do a big dog guest, you know, and a lot of us are growing our businesses and that means operations are changing and evolving. So I was like, you know what, let's get like the best. One of the best guys that I have access to, at least for operations. And so Tommy did a great job on Link Live. You know, volunteered his time, was a plethora of knowledge Tons of stories, great Q and A with the folks that were on last night. And it was just a really, really good discussion. Well, what one thing that Tommy hit on that I want to talk about for a couple of minutes relating to the new commercial site that we have, where I kind of revealed a process that we were doing indirectly, and I'm now, now doing a little bit more intentionally, is the handoff of a job after you make a sale or after you close the job. And a lot of folks mistake that, you know, selling the job means that you're going to continue to, you know, bill for it, earn the work. Everything's fine. The customer's happy. The crew member knows what's going on. Like, we're all on the same sheet of music because we sent an estimate and closed it or the customer approved it. And from the. The conversation today, I want to talk about is what does that handoff process look like from the owner, the estimator, the salesperson, whoever. Right. Depending on your company and how it's structured. Mine's different than yours, for sure. But what does that process look like to get to the person that's actually producing the work, mowing the grass, plowing the snow, or doing the design, build, install? Right. And I think it's going to be a couple bullet points that I wrote down here that some of them stemmed from our conversation on Link Live. But Tommy really gave some good thoughts that I think would. Would help. A little bit of everybody here today listening to the show about how to maybe make that a more formalized, documented process. And as he was describing this, you know, the other day, I'm like, yeah, like, I did this, this and this. Definitely could have done better at that. Definitely could have done better at this. And then we did great at this, this and this. You know, with this handoff on this new commercial site and a lot of the new work that we've been earning here at Brian's on maintenance. So that's what's my topic today. And I'm going to try to, you know, roll through it here for another 10 or 15 minutes, and then we'll try to keep it light again for this beautiful holiday weekend. Again, quick note. Like, we go all out for Memorial Day. There's parades. We do Fourth of July parade, not necessarily with, like, brands on maintenance at the company, but our local small town, you know, like seven minutes up the road. It's awesome. We love plugging in. They go all out. And, you know, there's always like the, the, the military veterans, and then Both political parties go through and one side booze the other. And I'm like, that's great for unity. And you know how that goes regardless of wherever everybody's at. And then, you know, basically after that, it's just a commercial for all the local town car dealerships and small businesses both from Memorial Day and fourth of July. It's kind of funny. I'm like, well, can't get, forget to get our corporate capitalism in there and you know, make the parade about a new Ford F150, you know, with 299 month lease payments. Right. So it's always kind of fun to see how things change and evolve, but no judgment, just, just kind of funny how it is what it is. But we really do enjoy this, this, you know, time to catch our breath. We try to remember, you know, the important dates and the, the important things. You know, D Day is coming up in another month or so and you know, they always say history has to be taught to the next generation or you're going to forget it. And I think that was Reagan or whatnot. Freedom and free enterprise is never more than one generation away from being extinct, right? Like you have to teach this stuff. You have to teach your country's history, you have to teach civics and heritage and American exceptionalism. And I 100% hook, line and sinker believe all that. Now I don't believe in half the nonsense that we know is going on behind the scenes with what's going on today for anybody right in the, in the country. But I still believe in like the true American, you know, spirit of industrial this and innovation and exceptionalism. Right. That's kind of the more of the core values that I'm subscribing to and prescribing to. So we do teach our kids the most that they can, the most that we can for what they can absorb at their age. Right. When we talk about certain holidays or Christmas and Easter and the real reason behind these things. And I would encourage you guys to, you know, try to reflect and spend a minute on some of this as well. Memorial Day is, you know, happy holiday, but it's, it's more of a somber, you know, note sometimes than what people might believe, you know, with sometimes, which is fireworks or hey, let's have a barbecue, right? So that's a quick little soapbox there, but I want to talk about the handoff. This will be a good conversation today. I think you guys will get a couple of good nuggets out of it and maybe something to give you some Thought, you know, process that might be able to help you guys grow your business and as you continue to expand and get new sites and new jobs. So let's just really quick before we hit the show sponsors, I do want to say the Element Break Records tour. This is a big deal. We've I booked about $12,000 worth of flights in the last 24 hours because I'm one of the two hosts that are flying around the country doing eight of these over the next six months. It's going to be absolutely ridiculous. There is not going to be one in June but then we have like back to backs in July, back to backs in September or October and we are going all across the country and Canada. I just want to give you guys a quick plug, check it out. You know, feel free to plug into one. I know some have a dozen people registered, others are pulling up to 75 registrations. I've been told like how crazy is that? So pick your favorite tour spot. There's going to be a lot of excitement. Day one is led by Gamble in the classroom. An eight hour day. It's going to be dude, I saw the slide deck or 75 slides. It's going to be meat and potatoes and a lot of thought process for you to grow business. Day two shop tour. Get to see the behind the scenes big companies and then even bigger companies. I'll just tell you honestly, some companies are 2 million, others are doing like 10, 15 million. One company I know that we're doing in Minnesota is a public statement that he made give away a half a million dollars in bonuses to his team. Like I'd love to do a half a million dollars in revenue or grow up by a half million dollars in revenue or pay payroll on a half a million dollars. Imagine giving a half a million dollars in bonuses. Okay, like that's good stuff. Some of these folks are opening up their tour shops for us to come blaze through and take advantage of it. So 7 or 800 ticket promo code Brian100 saves you 100 bucks towards that. It's going to be a really, really good time. Check out the LMN Break Records tour Other quick note and I, I just, I'm an event guy. I love going to things and plugging into stuff, you know. Iron Sharpeneth Iron for sure. Leanscaper Chicago we have a new updated affiliate link in our show notes. So if you guys do want to check out that whole ecosystem and really learn the operating system that Mark Bradley rolled out to his company to get it to a $50 million, business or any revenue notch along the way. It's not for people that are just doing big businesses. It's something that we're ascribing and prescribing to again, hooking their caboose to, to grow brands. All maintenance and we've got some fruit on the tree. It's working, it's growing. It's awesome. Like, we've been putting in the work to, to grow revenue and grow profitability. I know it's working. And we're following the roadmap that Mark's laying out on so many different avenues of people, finance, operations and sales. Okay. So it's going really, really well. But if you want to support promo code Brian or check out our affiliate link, you can sign up for all their fun stuff. They've got a lot of free community resources and Lana is like their chat GPT for lawn care. And then they also have a paid accelerator program like we have Link for folks, you know, doing zero to 2 million. And it's a great conversation. 49 bucks a month. It's a joke. It's. It's ridiculously how inexpensive it is for what you get. In my opinion, the accelerator program for starter, it's 400 bucks a month. I think for the, the newbie tier that does not get you free conference tickets. The paid group with grow tier and above, folks typically doing a million dollars plus. I think the first commitment, there's like 1500 bucks a month. It's a real commitment. But that is the tier that gets you the free conference tickets quarterly in that tier and above. But if you guys want to check out what they're putting together, and that gets you the weekly sprints and the webinars, which is the meat and potatoes outside of the quarterly intensives, that's where you learn everything that Mark Bradley is doing with leanscaper. He's your virtual CEO for 52 weeks. I do want to plug it for a quick minute because folks, it's transformative. And for the folks that are really diving in and drinking the Kool Aid, if you will, they're seeing tremendous results and growth in their business. Now that leanscaper has been kind of rolled out for 12 or 15 months, ourselves included. We came off of 1% profitability two years ago for Brian's Law Maintenance. It's hard to get out of the field scale and make profit. It really, really is. And I, and I will be writing that book eventually as well. Right. You guys know how it goes. But I'll just tell you, we are really Dialing into what Mark Bradley is sharing and teaching. And I'm telling you it's working and I'm really excited about that. And that's because we've been plugging into the leanscaper events and environment outside of the link community that we offer and going to, you know, LAL and the stuff that we host. That's where I'm getting fed, broadly speaking. Okay. So it's a really, really good time there and a lot of words to say. And I don't want this to be the only reason you go necessarily, but if you did, I don't think anybody would slate you or doxia. Dan Martel is one of the keynote, if not the keynote speaker, this quarterly conference and he wrote the book Buy back your time. Fantastic read. I would highly encourage you to check it out. It's 20 bucks, whatever, right? Phenomenal read. If you heard the bandwagon the last two years, everybody's been really pointing towards that book. Probably one of the best New York Times bestseller, self help and business and maybe even finance books, you know, in the last two years. Definitely a great read and a great resource. Dan Martell, who's made an incredible amount of money, he's doing a lot with software, tech, SaaS and AI. He's coming to the event in Chicago. And so your first event with leanscaper is free, right? It's a $3,000 ticket and it's free. And if you want to go sign up, check it all out, leave. We'll leave our link in our show notes. Click the link, it'll take you to our page. And click. I'm a first time attendee. And then that will get you to the right folks, the right funnel, if you will, to the right team that can get you vetted to get you a free ticket to see Dan Martell. I had two or three different people just in the last day that are making the pilgrimage over to Chicago. Guys, find a cheap Airbnb, find a Holiday Inn down the road for 100 bucks. You don't have to stay at the expensive hotel if you don't want. I get it. But nonetheless, come see Dan Martel. Like anybody arguably listening to my voice, a lot of like Midwest, east coast audience here. You guys can make it to Chicago. O' Hare is a pretty nominal flight. Couple hundred bucks and you can make the whole trip happen for, you know, 500 to a thousand bucks. I mean, it's pretty, pretty reasonable. And that's worth seeing Dan Martel alone. And maybe you get a chance to grab a photo or do a fist bump. Get to see the dude. That'd be awesome. He's, he's changed my business and a lot of things that I've have said and done and adopted and I don't want to just gloss over it. Right? It's going to be a really awesome time. And people like, well, I'll catch the next one or he'll be there at the next one. No, he won't. And what he's sharing, if he ever does come back to a different one, will be entirely different than what he shares at this one. All right, so make it a commitment. Make a decision. It's. It's the spring rush. I get it. A lot of us are still getting our flowers in and first mows and cleanups and first second rounds of fur. Like, I get it, it's a very busy time of year. But don't, don't let it, you know, just drive past and say, man, I wish it or I'll catch it next time or maybe next year. Like, no, dude, like make the decision to come out and check it out. Especially if it's a free ticket and you get to see Dan Martel, like, probably ain't. I told Liz. Liz actually is still actually thinking about coming. And we got the baby. It's totally different world for us with littles. But she's like, Dan Martel. I'm like, yeah, dude. She's like, I might try to figure this one out. I'm like, I would encourage you to. So who knows? But I'm telling you what, like, if the wife wants to go, I'm just telling you, you should probably be there as the leader of your organization. Amen. All right, so there's my little five minute soapbox there. Important stuff for sure. I want to make sure we tag those. And let's do this really quick. Let's hear from our today's show's sponsors announcements, anything else we might have missed. And then we'll talk a little bit more about the handoff process and we'll come right on back.
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I'm going to make this simple. If you run a landscape or outdoor power equipment business equipment quip exposition needs to be on your calendar October 20th through the 23rd in Louisville. This isn't a trade show where you walk around collecting pins. This is where you get hands on with equipment. Find software that actually fits your operation, level up your cruise training and invest a few days in your own growth as a business owner. The contractors building real systems are the ones winning right now and equip is where everything comes to together. The super early rate is $25 before May 31st. Go to equip exposition.com today to register. Register now at equip exposition.com or use the link in the podcast description. Save 50% off your registration when you apply the code. Brian at checkout. We can't wait to see you in Louisville.
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All right, so let's talk about the handoff process. This is something that again stemmed from a conversation from Tommy Cole from leanscaper and really his experience, you know, along the way being a contractor and being a project manager and something that I thought was something that we did really well the other day. And I'm going to continue to do this and refine. This is the handoff process for when we pick up a new maintenance customer. Now, forgive me, I'm not a design build guy. I'm not a, you know, hardcore landscaper, quote unquote, I'm a moan blow guy and we do snow. But the same philosophy still, I would imagine, applies to all the different facets of the work that all of us listening in are doing. The the entire conversation was simply, what is the handoff process look like when we're done selling it and getting it to the person who is going to produce it really simply, right? I wrote down a salesperson might know every detail, but if the crew leader doesn't know, then we're going to have potential challenges. You know, for example, right? Sales gets excited about the start of it, operations is going to fulfill it. There could be miscommunication that creates frustration and just really simply teams are going to need clarity to succeed. And again, what we're talking about here is scope, expectations, client personality, property, challenges, timeline, special notes, right? For maybe some of the design build guys and even really maintenance too. Every process or every job that we sell is going to need this transfer process from what the owner promised or over promised or you know, the timelines. Hey, like we'll get that going next week and the the crew leads, like what are we doing again? Or from you know, the morning rollout to going to do the job or a change order that pops up, like this information needs to get communicated to the team that's doing it. Let me give you guys a quick for instance over here. And then we'll kind of hop back and forth with some of the maybe the do's and don'ts or just some things to consider. But for example, the other day I was actually in the field doing some weeding. I had the laptop with me, which I made in a new prerogative and, you know, habit. I'm trying to make a new habit to make sure I always take my laptop with me, hotspot the phone. I was working on an estimate that I had the massage for this customer. Actually, quick note. Did an office drop in on the site? Because I was like, hey, we're kind of at this like waiting kind of standoff, you know, for the quote, approval. Did an office drop in 8:30 in the morning? They're like, yeah, we're just waiting for corporate. I'm like, cool. I just wanted to introduce myself, make sure that you knew there's actual real person emailing back and forth outside of our emails and phone calls. And the estimate they received wasn't about an hour later. We're like, hey, we do want to opt in for the other two service items that were listed as build per visit or optional. They wanted to bake those into the core contract. They said, screw it, let's just have you do all of it. It was the weeding and the fertilizer. So we have the cleanups, the mowing. Gosh, what else? The weeding, the fer and whatever else. So it was like all the different services that we're hoping to, to score with that client. Well, they. So I had to revise the contract. I did that in the LMN, in the car, on the laptop, in not even 10 minutes. Normally my VA would do it. I jumped on it and just was able to grab it, clean it up and then send it back over. We got the approval on it and from there the conversation, and this is what we're talking about today. The conversation is who is going to do the work next and what's that handoff process look like? Well, I put in the group chat, hey guys, scored this new site. Drop the name. I said I dropped a pin. And again, I don't have a formal process like this, but I'm going to build this out. We dropped a. We have a formal process to go from the estimate to a sold job. And the four or five tasks that we do, that's a new SOP video that's going to be in the SOP bundle for lmm because you have to, you know, create the job, schedule it to the crew, organize it on the whiteboard, on the calendar, schedule the reoccurring visits, set up the invoicing for it, set, send the first invoice, send the invoice, put the invoice in a invoice, job groups, because we bill on the first now it's a bill on the first client. So we have a new like six or seven step process, SOP document and supplemental video part of the SOP bundle. So if you're an LMN user, you're going to love that. Any of VA configure, watch that and have that pretty much licked in, you know, 20 or 30 minutes in two or three different run throughs. That's a process that we've just refined and really finalized, you know, for our business. The last couple of weeks it's been awesome as we earn these new sites all spring, but now it's in the field. How does the field handoff work? So in a short list, hey, guys, here's the new site. I dropped the pin. Everybody knows where it's at. I told them, hey, here's the service, the scope of work. They're going to be a weekly client. And here's the services that you guys are doing. Here's the services that I have to do. Also, it's going to get fertilized by Padell. Then number two, I told which crew that it was assigned to, right? And so that crew now has it obviously assigned an element. And on the crew app, it's organized correctly, it's ordered correctly not only for that day, but all future routes, right? And then I dropped the. I told what crew it's for. Then I said, hey, I'd love to wow the customer. My guys know that we're. And I've communicated this quite a bit. We're trying to sell perfect right now here at Brian's on maintenance. Are we perfect? Gosh, no. Do we have a lot of stuff we can fix? Of course. All day, every day, just like you guys. I think everybody does a solid A minus. Humbly put. Somebody else might say it's a C plus, but I feel like we're doing an A minus and we're of course doing the best that we all can, right? But I said, hey, would anybody be able to call dibs to go on over and to wow them. I want same day or next day service for a new client and I want to make sure that I'm calling them a day or two later or same day if I could, after they mow it and make sure the client is happy. We met their expectations. So more on that in a minute. One of my guys called dibs. He was half a mile down the road doing another commercial site. He's like, we got it. It was actually the crew that was going to do it anyway, moving forward. And I Said, awesome. From there, I also dropped a screenshot of the property from Attentive. I took off, took off all of the colored services, right? Like mulch beds, blue and purples, parking lots and driving lanes, you know, yellow shrubs. Green is obviously grass. So what I did is turned off all the, you know, the little, like, show and unshow icon, turned off everything so it's all gray, highlighted lawn, so it's green. And the green areas are the mobile areas for that crew. Why is that important? Well, imagine this. Imagine you just tell your new guy or newer guys or guys that have never mowed this site, hey, go mow that property. And you know, there's a thousand different variables to any job, but you're like, go mow that property. And they go, okay, like, what's the boundary lines that might be a little bit more distinct or established on residential sometimes, but not all the time in commercial. It might be very common sense, very easily noted or denoted, but not necessarily. And regardless if it is or isn't, why are we guessing? Why are we not giving our team the tools to make sure that they can do the job correctly and effectively the first time? And I thought to myself, like, duh, like, we've been starting to do this. We've been able to send maps to our guys, and we've done this quite a bit lately. But it just really, like, made me think about this real time. Same time as Tommy Cole was on Link Live, sharing this, I'm like, oh, my God. Like, I did a perfect handoff. What I believe to be as good of a handoff as I could directly, like, intentionally, but also maybe inadvertently. Right? And that's why I'm thinking, hey, we need to write this down. And that's why it's today's topic for you guys. If I'm learning, I'm hopefully you guys are learning too. So I drop a screenshot. Screenshot screen share of the site with the areas highlighted in green for the turf, for the areas that we're doing. There was no second guessing. My crew calls me up. He says, hey, we're headed to that side right now. I said, fantastic. Thanks for jumping on it. He goes, does the map what the areas of mowing? I said, yep. He said, anything in particular that I gotta look out for? I said, no, I'm gonna be walking the site again in a couple of hours to do some weeding over there myself, just to make sure that we can get it all up in the up to snuff, if you will. It's. It's our weeding schedule this week. And no, otherwise it should be good to go just in green areas that are the mobile turf. He said, fantastic. I'll call you if I have any challenges. Imagine the amount of phone calls in so many different ways that that eliminates guys. No longer does the crew lead or the people producing it need to know where the boundary lines are or aren't. There's no missed areas, hopefully. Right. And no callbacks from the client saying, hey, like, you guys did a good first job, but they missed this whole strip along the building or along the. The neighboring property or site. It just takes all that guesswork out. It saves me having to call the crew lead back and say, dude, let me get off the zoom or this presentation or this estimate that I'm doing or whatever, I'm at lunch or whatever and say, let me, let me fix this and give you like a better suggestion or a better verbal interpretation of what I think you should be doing. Right. There's no guesswork when you have photos for the most part. Right. It's not infallible, obviously, but it does go a long way. So that, that whole handoff process, I said, hey, by the way, you're gonna see this. It's not gonna be an LMN just yet. For we had a. A scenario where I'm recording another video. So I want to use this job as a. A guinea pig for another SOP video. And again, I'm not trying to plug the SOP bundle here, but I'm just telling you, I think just in the month of May alone, based on the rollout, based on suggestions and feedback from you guys, there's gonna be another seven or eight videos. A couple in the field and a couple in the office that are fantastic suggestions. And these are some of those videos that you guys are asking for. I'm like, dude, yeah. Like, I can't believe I never thought about that. Shocker. So lifetime updates, lifetime upgrades in the SOP bundle. I can easily see in a year or two, this thing, having a couple of hundred training videos for the office, admin side and the field. It's going to be ridiculous. It's a thousand bucks. Like, I have a thousand hours into this thing. I bet you. You know what I mean? Literally. So I'm. So it wasn't in the job for elements. I told my guys, hey, I'm actually going to use this job to record an SOP video later so you won't see it populated into crew. Just tell me when you complete it and I'll manually switch it over to complete it. Otherwise, my paragraph would be, you'll see the job populated in LMN in Crew Refresh, your crew app. So you see it pop up and it'll be organized and routed through the future routes. And for, for the remaining visits for the rest of the season. Let me know if you see anything that sticks out or it's not right. So we have this like, awesome process of I get the approval. My VA has seven steps that she follows to go in LMN and switch a bunch of stuff around, which is all very simple to do, but we got to produce the job from the, from the office side and organize it correctly. Then the field handoff is, here's the expectations, here's the work that we're doing, here's the site map. Let me know how it goes once you're done. That way I can call the client, right? And there's a five to seven step process on our end, Right. That's really, really, really helpful. And again, you're helping with so much here. Expectations. You're talking to the, both the customer and the team about, you know, like, all this stuff isn't living in anybody's head right at the end of the day. Like, it's not in just text messages that get buried or on sticky notes or random phone calls. We're able to keep everybody on the same sheet of music for the scope of what we're doing. The expectations, the client, you know, personality, maybe they're a little bit more high end. Maybe they're like super casual, right? But that way I can have that crew lead. No, dude, we got to make sure we're doing a good job on this site. Obviously, we always do a good job, but, dude, double cut when you need to. Don't blow the clippings over by the owner's car. Don't plow snow into that parking spot. That's where the owner's parking spot, right? Like all these nuances of all the site. And again, I just, I know I've received phone calls that I have nobody to blame but myself when something doesn't go perfect, maybe on that first or second visit or something gets sloppy. And then the customer calls and then you're like, hey, you got to tell the crew. And the crew goes, oh, we didn't know. Oh, we didn't know. And they're always super, like, forgiving and, you know, apologetic. Hey, like, we'll fix it. We'll do whatever's right. I mean, most of my guys, you know, are that way, so are your guys'. But if they don't know, then we're not really setting them up for success. And that's why I realized that the blind spot that we have in our handoff process when we get new sites. So just something to think about. Just something to think about, Right. I know this could be a giant discussion for you. Design, build hardscape guys out there for sure. That's really what Tommy hammered on for probably half an hour yesterday. You know, like, what's the expectation? We sell a job, it's 10 days, four guys on site, 40 hours a day, and it's a, whatever, 400 hour job, whatever the numbers are, right. Like, what are we trying to do with the first 40 hours? What are we trying to do by day one, by day two, by day four, by day five? Right. And Tommy had this great, you know, breakdown. Are we trying to, day one, you know, get all the top soil and the facade and the grass peeled back here? I am going to lose credibility here. Whatever y' all do for design work, right? And hardscaping work. Day two, are we excavating out all the base and have the base backfilled with the, the stones and the rocks to make sure that everything rocks, the base material. Right. To make sure that we can get ready for whatever's the next step in the process on day three and day four. Like, has your team had a huddle to get a roadmap for that job? Do you have it written down on paper or is it like. Yeah, you know, if we get the foundation dug out between day one and three, that's fine. Well then, you know, you do the. We're going to backfill with this and we're going to put the pavers down and then the plant material on this. Wow. New front walkway and landscape bed. And then, you know, everything just drifts. There's no realignment, there's no 4 o' clock at 4 check ins. We just drift, drift, drift. And then by the end of, you know, 11 days or 12 days, we've ran 510 hours on the job and we've lost, you know, if we're bidding it at 20% profitability, we're down to a 7% net because we overran on labor hours, for example. Right. But there's no handoff, there's no process. Right. I'm not gonna redo Tommy's talk. If you want join link, you can watch the live stream tomorrow. Like, it's that simple. We give you two plus years of guest interviews like this there's what, a hundred interviews, I guess, by now, or, I'm sorry, 25 to 30 interviews by now, Once a month. You get that on day one. Like, it's ridiculous. So go through Tommy's notes in his conversation and hear how he explained this whole thing. But his, his. He comes from the world of dirt work, and he's like, if you touch dirt twice, nobody's made any money. When you're talking about the crews in the field, there's no expectations when the certain checkpoints should be done or completed. And I thought that was like, a very practical conversation that probably anybody listening in, like, have you ever told your team, hey, by day two, this needs to be done. By day three, we need to be here. Day four, we need to be there. And day five, we need to be there. Funny story. And I didn't bring this up on the live because I didn't want to hog any time, but when I was having my front landscaping done and Troy Clogg's team was out there, the foreman did his morning huddle at 7:30, 8:00'. Clock, and when I happened to, you know, go on out there just to check in, and I was videoing a lot of it to make some vlogs for you guys because it was a really fun process and most expensive front end and most expensive. Most amount of money I've ever spent on landscaping by far. I was an apartment dweller, dude. Like, for. For. For a decade, you know, we never owned landscaping and spent a gob up front on my front landscaping and walkway looks beautiful. The guys did it. A phenomenal job. But when I happened to go on out there and when the crew lead and the foreman or whatnot was on site, he'd say, hey, just so you know, here's what we're trying to do today. And I'm like, oh, cool. And, you know, some of it was like, I was trying to get some social media. I'm like, when did the pavers go down? I want to see the pavers like these new platinum beacon hills, right? The whole deal. And he goes, we're not going to actually do those for two more days. Believe it or not, we got a lot of prep work, bass, sub base, whatever. This, that material in trucking that we might lose a day, you know, this week with rain, and that might even push us to next week. But when we're getting ready, I'll let you know. Because he's looking at this thing very, like, compartmentalized, very checkpoint oriented. And they had this whole set of Plans and the, the schedule and what days we're doing what. And it was, it was phenomenal. In shocker, they're a, you know, 15 plus 20 million dollar, you know, landscape company that does high end hardscape landscapes and an incredible amount of snow with Troy Clog. And I was able to see that process, at least a good process. And again, I don't know if it's good or great, but from a customer standpoint and a guy who doesn't know much about hardscaping, it was really cool to see that they had a road map. Here's what we're trying to do today, here's what we're trying to do tomorrow. And you know, it was a great conversation about what does that handoff for that process look like? Like what's the road map look like? And I, I just thought it was a really interesting conversation. Right. At the end of the day, wrote a couple things down here. Any other property expectations? Right. This is just some of the low hanging fruit when I was uh, running through here. Priority areas, mowing frequency, bed maintenance schedule, the fertilization schedule, any irrigation notes. Hey, don't dig here. Right? There's a, there's a well or, or a gas line. Seasonal rotations. Who's that? Point of contact, gate codes, HOA manager information. Priority areas. Complaint history. Are they a sensitive tenant? Parking restrictions. You can't park on this side of the road, you can't park here between 7 and 9. Can't park here during the weekend, you can't park here during the winter. The customer's preferred communication style. Dude, you start kind of peeling this back, I'm like, what in the world? I never even considered half of these things. Right. We just take it for granted. Yeah, just new residential client. Mow the grass where we park. I don't care. Wherever is across the street. Well, maybe that customer told you that that neighbor across the street's a jerk. And they don't want anybody parked there. Well, it's public property. Yeah, well, we also don't need fist fights and one star reviews. Right? I mean this is real stuff. You have map and photo logistics equipment access points. Hey, don't go over there. That's the, the main line for their gas. We don't want to take the 6 ton excavator or whatever you guys do over that gas line. Okay, good to know. Trailer parking. Where does water access? Dumpster locations. Right. For the crew. Hey, here's our estimated production hours. Here's our crew assignment. Here's our profitability target. Here's some special instructions. Right. Like before, you just sell the job and then give it to the crew. Ask the crew or the crew lead to look at the job with you was one of Tommy's points. And say, would you look at this thing? Here's what I'm bidding for hours. Here's what I'm bidding for price. I don't know, I don't do a lot of hardscape work, but what do you think? Oh, well, based on this, this and this, I don't think we're going to be able to do that in that amount of time. You might want to. That's another like 5 or 10% on hours just for that situation alone. Oh, that's awesome. That's good to know. I never would have thought about that. So again, I don't want to be at a dead horse here or whatever the saying is, but have these pre production meetings, have this handoff process. I don't care if it's a text message, a crew huddle in the morning, or, you know, an email exchange. Just make sure you're giving as much debt as you can and have a process. And for what you guys do to make sure that it's simple, replicatable and duplicatable and a consistent process for the type of work that you guys are doing. All right, it doesn't need to be this like, we do 25 different things, 25 different processes. Most of us out there are doing the same four or five different things. We're mowing often. We're doing commercial mowing, we're doing hardscape, we're doing irrigation. It's the same, you know, job, just the job looks different. So let's make sure that we hammer out those 10 or 15 nuances and maybe just have a running checklist. Maybe create an SOP ask chat as Lana to help you create a running SOP checklist of the thought process. I'm sorry, of the. Of the handoff process to the field to do the work. All right. And give me a little bit of time and maybe you can build something like that and put that in the SOP bundle as well. We're doing one again for the office admin. When we sell a job, we're going to do one for the field for mowing for sure. As we continue to procure new sites and everything I just described today. So maybe we'll go through that and make an SOP for the the checklist and the VA can then communicate to the team, hey, here's a new site. Here's the 10 different things. They can email or drop in the WhatsApp, you know, message or the text message. And then that way I'm getting myself out of the communique handoff and I don't need to, I, I can close the job, my VA can sell it, schedule it, invoice for it, the whole deal and then communicate with the team in the field. Hey, you have a new site, a new on this route at this time at this place. Here's the map. Keep an eye out for these couple of notes, right? And I'm removing myself further from the process, which is the goal. Right? So this is a, a very important conversation. I don't want to just drop this show on a Friday and everybody just say, yeah, like sounds good, dude. Like for the people that do that, you're gonna work yourself a job for quite a while. And for those of you that are looking to grow and scale a business and work yourself out of jobs and little minutia like this, this is the way to do it. All right. This is at least what I'm doing. I'll just share you with that. All right, great conversation today. I hope you guys enjoyed it. A lot of little nuance and takeaways here. Look forward to both of those documents here in our SOP bundle by the end of month. I want to make sure that that happens. And, and again, check out leanscaper, check out the Grandom tour, by the way. Two quick notes and I'll, and I'll run up with this. We're going to do a pop up element demos. We're going to do two new ones here, let me get you guys the dates really quick. It is going to be June 3rd, I know for sure. It's a Wednesday at 2pm and then we're going to do another element pop up demo June 6th, Saturday morning at 7am I know some of you guys don't want to do Saturday mornings. For sure. I get that. Like you got family, these are traveling, you got kids, soccer and baseball. Love it, love it, love it. Hell, you just want to sleep in. I've heard that one. I'm just sleeping in that day. Like it's my one day off or two days off. No problem at all. I get it. We're going to try something different where we get you a registration for or a time slot to see a demo on Wednesday at 2pm and again you get to see an under the hood. Look at my personal Element account. We'll have Troy Woodham, who's Element salesperson he's an awesome dude. We'll run you through starter, we'll run you through the difference with pro, you can see how we do our maintenance estimates. And then we'll probably do another popup demo like this sometime mid to late July as we maybe start the snow discussion. Maybe you want to tackle your snow this year with LMN bidding, estimating, and then of course with crew to track and get all the work produced. We'll do another one of these here every couple of six or eight weeks over the next couple of months. It'll be really fun, but haven't really hammered, you know, Element, other than like, know your numbers, right? Kind of a deal for a couple of months. Because I know we're all busy working the last couple of months, rightfully so. But for all of you guys that are looking to maybe, as Wayne Gretzky says, right, skate to where the puck is going, you want to start thinking snow, start, you know, getting a handle on your numbers for Q3, Q4, even into next year. You want to start looking at the Element platform. Now. Let me give you guys a demo. Troy can run it through it. I can run through it. I'll show you exactly how our account works and give you just another hood look. And if there's two of you or 200 of you, we'll spend the time, as much time as you need, hopefully about an hour each day and morning to show you guys a look at the platform. And you can go down the rabbit hole with Troy after and sign up if you're interested. And again, Code Brian saves you a bag everywhere you go, and including, I think, 10% minimum with what we got going on for Element. In fact, I think they have a promotion. One of the girls emailed me the other day and said that you get a couple of months for free right now, which is pretty cool. I don't know the specifics on that. We'll try to get you guys that offer or better. But again, I know a lot of you guys are growing and scaling and looking to adopt more robust software that can help you with your bidding and pricing and estimating process. Element is 100% the way to do it, in my opinion. Especially, especially if you're growing past, you know, 3, 400 grand in revenue, you're definitely do so. All right, folks, a lot of words today. We'll keep all the information tight for you in the show notes. Again, thank you for the support and also hope you guys enjoy the show and are getting a lot of good nuggets. Out of the podcast. I feel like we've been on a pretty good upswing the last couple of weeks with some really good shows and topics. If you got a topic, submit it to me via DM or email. Love to talk about anything that you guys want to talk about and that's all I got. Happy Memorial Day Weekend if you will to all of you guys. I hope you guys enjoy the holiday weekend and get some much deserved rest that we all need after this long six or eight weeks of spring. Over and out fam. Love you. Appreciate you. Have a great day. Look forward to catching up with all you guys here on the next one. See ya.
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What would you change in your business if your team could operate with confidence without needing you at every turn? That's the goal behind the LaunchPreneur Academy SOP bundle. This powerful training system was built from real world processes used inside a growing company designed to help you train your field crews, develop your office staff, and create the structure needed to scale. You'll get over 50 field training SOPs covering everything from mowing in snow to trailers, blades and equipment basics. You'll also get office training for leads, estimates, payroll, marketing systems and more, plus over 30 documents and resources to help you build a stronger business foundation. Best of all, it works with the systems you already use. The price is only 9.99. You heard that right. Just 9.99. Get in early at launchpreneuracademy.com
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thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast with Bryan Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please please consider leaving us a five star review for the show. While the techniques and ideas presented here are designed to help you grow a more successful and profitable business, no one can guarantee these results for you. We want to emphasize that entrepreneurship is not easy and the ideas presented here are just the opinions of Brian Fullerton and his respective guests. No one can guarantee success for you. That being said, we hope the ideas presented here help you and motivate you to go on out there and crush it with your own business.
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Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
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we hope to see you on the next episode.
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This has been a Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.